The Ring and the Book, by Robert Browning

Introduction

The Ring and the Book, the longest and most important of Browning’s poems, is the product of several years
of creative activity during the period of his fullest maturity. The love romance which had enriched his life for
fifteen years had come to an end, and his thought was searching more profoundly than ever before the problems of life
and death. For twenty years he had been devoting his art to casual subjects in rich succession; Men and Women
and Dramatis Personœ lay in the immediate past, and the dramatic monologue had become an easy from for voicing
his imaginations; yet he must have craved the fuller joy of expressing through some larger subject and at far greater
length his conception of human life and of the Divine in and above the world.

The occasion for this expression came in the chance discovery of the Old Yellow Book in June 1860 on a
market barrow in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, Florence, as told by Browning in the poem. This book is the record of a
sensational murder trial at Rome, January-February 1698, and gives many of the facts and motives of an ignoble intrigue
for certain properties, culminating in a brutal assassination and in the subsequent execution of the criminals. It was
a dark page from the criminal annals of Rome, and time had all but effaced the record when it fell into the hands of
the poet. The problem of making these dead fragments live again challenged the imagination of Browning, and by the
power of his imagination he saw there in Florence that June night how the crime had stirred Rome a century and a half
earlier. So interested did he become in the Franceschini story that he frequently told it to his friends in
conversation, and is said to have offered it to one of them as the plot of an historical novel. Eventually the
inspiration came to him to tell the story through his art of poetry, and what was more, he saw the opportunity of
expressing through the incidents of this base crime his own fuller vision of man. The interpretation of the Yellow
Book in his poem involved the whole problem of life as the poet saw it.

How then should he unfold his views? His own age had perfected the novel to present at length the activities and
motives of man, and Browning learned much of his art from the novel. Yet he was no novelist, and he left unattempted
the possible historical novel in the subject. Long years before he had tried the drama, and had been defeated by a half
success, nor could a stage drama trace the minute threads of motive in this case. In the narrative poem as such he had
little interest, and seldom practised the fascination of the narrator. Browning’s one purpose in the art of poetry was
to search the heart deeply for motive. He had by years of practice developed the dramatic monologue to a high point of
efficacy in expressing motive. It is accordingly not surprising that he made a “strange art of an art familiar,” and by
the repetition of the story in many forms in a series of dramatic monologues, he invented a new type of poem which grew
directly out of the material before him, and enabled him to tell the Franceschini story more truly than through any of
the established forms of art.

This tragic course of events had not developed simply and symmetrically. Life seldom does. It was a confused web of
disputed fact, with motive and counter-motive, genuine or sham, conventional or personal, further entangled by the
professional casuistry of the lawyers, until the right and wrong of the story seemed hopelessly obscured. Such
confusion surrounds every deeper crisis which stirs the heart of man, as is illustrated in the journalistic hubbub
around every sensational crime and its trial at the bar of justice. Literary art tends to simplify all this by the
intensification of the prevailing motives, and by the eradication of whatever distracts from these. Yet in the
successive development of the epic, the drama, and the novel as methods of picturing life, there has been a distinct
evolution away from this artistic singleness toward the variety and intricacy of life. The novel offers large
opportunities to present this human complexity. Browning carries literary development a step farther by using in a new
way the multi-monologue form of narrative, in which he tells the story from a series of personal standpoints, each of
which modifies fact and motive with iridescent shadings of significance and with the perplexing but thrilling
uncertainties which we find in real life. He illustrates by his art also the great principle which he found in life —
the apparent relativity of truth —“The truth is this to thee and that to me.” He sees that the perception of truth is
one of the most vital functions of personality, and that the kind and degree of our perception of it are invariably
restricted by all limitations of personality. In monologue after monologue in his previous art Browning had tinged a
thought or a passion or a story by the prejudice of the speaker. When at last he found the Old Yellow Book, it
gave him illustration after illustration of such perversion of truth through personal bias. It became inevitable for
him, therefore, in his strong sense of the obligation to represent the full truth of the tragedy, that he should tell
and retell the story from the various personal standpoints possible until he had turned every phase of it to the
reader. His figures of the landscape and the glass ball, book i. II. 1348-1378, illustrate this.

The Franceschini tragedy and the environing life of Rome thus come to live again before the reader in all that
essential intricacy which we find in the world outside of books. In fact, the poem gives the impression not of a book,
but of throbbing life, confused almost past finding out. We should read the successive monologues not for a chain of
incident, nor for the achievement of a final judgment on the merits of the case, but to study the hearts of actors and
spectators alike, as they pulsate with passions, noble or ignoble, which surge around that act of murder on January 2,
1698.

What persons then should be chosen as narrators? What personal standpoints were significant and vital to the
complete understanding of the tragedy? First and most important were the three principals — the husband, the wife, and
the priest Caponsacchi. Then the legal presentation of facts in the Yellow Book suggested the representation
of the professional interpreters of law. Was not law the “patent-truth- extracting process” which man had established
to ascertain the rights and wrongs of such cases? Hence Browning includes two of the attorneys found in the recorded
case, though he cannot suppress his ironic attitude toward them. Above the lawyers stood their ultimate superior, the
Pope, through whose final judgment the sentence was executed against the criminals; in him was exhibited judicial
deliberation illuminated by an almost prophetic insight into divine truth. Beyond these six monologues, the poet saw
the need of other narratives, which would present the story as it appeared to common, outside Rome. None of the actual
personages involved, such as Abate Paolo, Canon, Conti, or Violante, could serve this purpose satisfactorily. Hence the
poet invented two purely, typical, anonymous personages, “Half- Rome” and “Other Half-Rome,” who represent the two
prejudiced camps of opinion which made up “reasonless, unreasoning Rome.” These speakers were doubtless suggested to
the poet by the two anonymous Italian narratives of the murder story, which are included in the Yellow Book.
Then in a sport of irony and caricature he invented “Tertium Quid”— a third Something — the supercilious, contemptuous
opinion of the man who takes pride in his unsympathy, and who plays with judgment trivially, smartly, and sneeringly,
even in the face of this violent crime — who found nothing in human life worthy of serious consideration save the
etiquette and intrigue of his own polite circle. These three typical personages represent the opinion of Rome at large,
but they also afford the poet and opportunity to tell and retell the story until all the details of fact have become
familiar to the reader. Consequently when he passes on to the heart of the poem in the monologues of Guido,
Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, he need no longer tell a story, but can devote himself entirely to such incidents and
passions as bring out most fully and subtly the character of the speakers. The reading of books ii., iii., and iv., is
a fundamental preparation of the reader for the complete understanding of the monologues of Guido, Caponsacchi, and
Pompilia. When the poet had written these thrice three monologues he evidently felt his poem to be incomplete of final
effect if he left the reader in any possible uncertainty as to the true nature of Guido. In book v. the poet had
presented the Guido of skilled subterfuge and of supercilious reliance on the privileges of a sham social condition. He
would now give us the genuine Guido, fierce, brutal, ignoble, depraved, blasphemous, till we shudder at the abyss of
darkness in his heart. These are the ten monologues of the Ring and the Book, not ten repetitions of the same
story, but ten glimpses into the human heart as it reacts upon a story which every changes with the personality of the
narrator.

To this body of the poem Browning adds his prefatory and concluding books, both of them entirely unconventional in
their form, but direct and vitally truthful to the poem as a whole, and to the Old Yellow Book before the
poet. The first book is an invaluable preparatory miscellany, including the explanation of the title of the poem, an
account of the finding of the Yellow Book, of its contents, of Browning’s immediate interest in it, and of his
creative reaction in response to it; then a series of summaries of the monologue situations which follow in the
succeeding books of the poem, and finally the invocation and dedication to Mrs.Browning. The concluding book is equally
miscellaneous, and its purpose is to complete the story which had been broken by Guido’s shriek in his dungeon, and to
lead the reader down from the glaring lights of mid-story into the creeping oblivion which overtook this fact as it
overtakes all things human. The device of telling about Guido’s execution through the letters of eye-witnesses was
suggested to the poet by the three letters of the Yellow Book, one of which, the letter of Arcangeli, is
included in full, lines 239 — 288. From the additional Italian narrative which had fallen to his hands, Browning then
fashions the ghastly spectacle of the throngs of Rome pressing curiously and unfeelingly around Guido’s scaffold. Even
the final absolution of the memory of Pompilia and the establishment of her innocence takes the form of the court
decree included in the Yellow Book. At last the inevitable tide of time surges over all, and the Franceschini
tragedy and its stir in Rome are swept into final oblivion.

Through the ten voices of the ten monologues, Browning does not merely tell a story; he pictures the life of Rome
and Arezzo in the year 1698, with all their play of professional and social motive. The accounts of the motives of
Guido and Caponsacchi for entering the church reveal the great worldly ecclesiastical establishment of which they are a
part. In domestic life the sacrament of marriage is pictured as mere barter and sale, not unmingled with fraud.

Marriage making for the earth,

With gold so much — birth, power, repute, so much,

Or beauty, youth so much, in lack of these.

And the law and the law courts, with their countless delays and perversions of justice are seen in a confusion of
law. suits, civil and criminal, which surrounded Pompilia’s life. Rome is portrayed in the poem with an art more subtle
and penetrating than is usually found in the art of the historical novel.

Yet here, as at all times, Browning is interested in men rather than institutions; in Abate Paolo, Canon Conti, the
Confessors Romano and Celestino rather than in the church as such; in Arcangeli and Bottini rather than in the
profession of the law. Hence many who were mere names in the Yellow Book become personal and alive in the
poem. Violante stands forth in all her meddlesome self-will. Donna Beatrice grows portentously to a true novercal type,
amplifying the sketch of the old duchess in the Flight of the Duchess. The worldly Bishop of Arezzo again
yields to the Franceschini in bland deference the victim they desire. A score and more of persons have started into
life from the old record, and are significant to Browning as a searcher of the heart of man.

But it is in the interpretation of the three chief actors that the creative Browning best found expression. Guido,
Caponsacchi, and Pompilia become at last the measure of Browning’s mastery and insight, and are the high-water mark of
his creative imagination.

Browning has represented many evil men in his art, but all his other villains pale into insignificance beside the
full, passionate, living portrayal of Guido Franceschini. Yet Guido is not a monster, nor an accidentally unfortunate
man; he is the hideous outgrowth of a self-seeking, Christless society, in which nobility is no longer a spiritual
attribute, but has become a mere merchantable asset and a shield for crouching littlenesses. The Yellow Book
makes plain accusation concerning the ruthless greed of Guido, but Browning connects this with the effete nobility and
the worldly churchmanship of the day as he saw it. And this theme of greed is made to run through the whole
Franceschini family with variations. Guido’s final desperation of hate and of misanthropy expresses itself in his
terrible ravings in his prison cell on the night before his execution.

Caponsacchi, on the other hand, is Browning’s highest conception of heroic manhood, not an unreal, and vainly ideal
dream, but a passionate, earnest, and great-hearted man, with a lovable impetuosity and rashness at times. He is a
modern St. George, saving a woman in desperate plight by a reckless display of courage. Called suddenly from the
narrow, uneventful life of an idle, fashionable canon, not by a great, shining duty, but by a low cry of pain from the
roadside, he threw prudence and self-seeking to the wind that he might worship God in saving this woman. Though he is
summoned by pity, he is detained by passion — not a debasing, physical passion, but passion controlled by the
consecrating power of reverential love, as of the divine. He worships Pompilia with no merely conventional worship of
love- sick poetising, but he bows, is blest by the revelation of Pompilia, who seems to him to be an embodiment of the
virtues of the Madonna, whom he as a priest had been taught to revere. Into this portrait of his “soldier-saint”
Browning put much that was noblest in his own high type of manhood.

In Pompilia, Browning has achieved his master picture of woman. Probably the character of the real Pompilia as it
shone from the affidavit of Fra Celestino in the Old Yellow Book fixed the poet’s attention on this story. She
is represented there as saint and martyr in simple loveliness of character. He further endowed her with the highest
spiritual graces which may glorify woman, the passion of maternity, the devoted love for the man who embodies her ideal
of manly nobility, and her unquestioning faith in God “held fast despite the plucking fiend.” These are greater and
more essential to the highest womanhood than the intellectuality of Balaustion, or the social charm and grace of
Colombe. Pompilia of the Yellow Book has been glorified at last with all that Browning had found most divine
in that woman whom he reverenced primarily as a woman of these same spiritual graces, and only secondarily as a woman
of genius.

The Pope might be added to the noble portraits of this great poem of humanity. As Caponsacchi may be said to
represent the passionate and noble-worldly side of Browning’s nature, so the Pope represents his graver, more other
worldly character. Browning has given us an unfading portrait of the great, wise, grave Pope, facing a sad duty, and
turning from it to confront the darkest problems which may assail the human heart. But he creates the Pope less as a
portrait than as a mouthpiece. Through this wise, earnest personality he would speak what he himself felt most deeply
in the tragedy. No historic Pope could have spoken as Browning makes Pope Innocent speak. It may be pointed out that
Browning uses his other great old men of this period in the same way, as mouthpieces of his own vision of truth: for
such undoubtedly is his use of Rabbi Ben Ezra, of the Apostle John, and of the Russian village pope in Ivan
Ivanovitch. Through the Pope, therefore, Browning gives his own mature verdict in the case, and gives it weight by
the impressive personality of the Pope as he presents him.

The slow toil of years had at last carried out the plan which came suddenly to the poet as he was thinking of the
materials in the Yellow Book, yet it was not the “gold” of fact but the “alloy” of personality, the richly
endowed nature of Robert Browning that raised the poem to greatness. It is at last the one poem which seems to employ
every power of his mastership, and to utter his deepest convictions concerning the life of man.